by Terry Mixon
Considering that Falcone had said the Agency didn’t even know if the Phoenix was a man or a woman, that sounded like useful information to Brad.
“What’d he sound like?” Brad asked. “Anything like the Terror?”
The prisoner laughed. “I only heard a couple of sentences, and there’s only so much that I can guess about some guy I barely saw. One thing I can say for sure: he wasn’t raving like the Terror usually did. Then again, I have no idea how the Terror behaved in private.”
“But you saw his face?” Falcone asked.
“Well, not really. The captain swung the monitor around real fast, so I only caught a glimpse. That doesn’t really count. Just enough to say he was a dark-haired skinny bugger in a vac-suit.”
“I decide what counts. You just bought yourself a reprieve. I’m going to have these troopers put you into a different cabin while we decide exactly what we’re going to do next.”
The two troopers took that as their cue to escort the prisoner out.
Brad waited until they were gone to speak. “Do you really think that’s going to lead us to identifying the Phoenix?”
She shrugged. “All it takes to unravel a case like this is one teeny thread. Who knows? Maybe one of the other prisoners can give us more information. If not, we might get something when the ship or ships this tanker was supposed to meet show up. I’m not counting anything out at this point.”
Sadly, none of the other prisoners had anything useful to add. That was disappointing for Brad, but it did clear the decks for the next stage of the operation. Now he only had to figure out how to lure a Cadre warship into range for his ships to jump it. And, of course, to actually capture it and some of its crew.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Just in case the asteroid was under observation, Brad ordered a slow approach with his corvettes leading the way. They coasted in with their passive scanners cranked up to maximum sensitivity, and only after they’d determined there was no one waiting did he authorize the tanker to go in, with the destroyers bringing up the rear.
Unlike what people saw in the vids, the asteroid’s makeup was not homogenous. It wasn’t a hunk of rock or metal, but a conglomerate of dust, pebbles, and larger chunks held together by its own weak gravity. It spun lazily in the dim sunlight, completely unremarkable.
Now the waiting game started. The only way he figured they could capture whatever ship came to meet the tanker was an ambush. And that meant getting a lot closer than they could get with his ships, even with their advanced stealth technology.
Contrary to popular belief, the bodies in the asteroid belt were scattered far and wide, with ones large enough to shield a ship from observation typically not being in handy striking range. That made this task even more difficult but was probably why the Cadre had chosen the location for its illicit refueling. They’d see treachery a long way off.
The only certainty was that the warship—whether it turned out to be their carrier or their cruiser—would have to dock with the tanker. That was the only way to transfer the He-3. That was the Vikings’ opportunity.
To prevent a possible collision between the tanker and whatever ship it was fueling, the hoses were relatively long, but when it came to space, those kinds of distances were still very short. No more than a couple of hundred meters.
With that in mind, Brad had stationed every trooper they had on the tanker. By pulling people from various sections of his four ships, he was able to give the tanker a minimum crew. Enough to get this job done, if not enough people to fly the ship for very long.
Once the shooting started, it was all too likely the tanker would be destroyed. That meant the crew manning the ship would be joining the attack. Their job wouldn’t be shooting at the enemy, though some of them had proven very adept from the additional training Saburo had given them over the last few years. No, their job would be attempting to disable the vessel and any self-destruct charges while the troopers took the fight to the enemy.
Unfortunately, he still needed to stash his ships somewhere nearby. Far enough away that they wouldn’t be detected, but close enough to respond if the larger warship had smaller escorts. Which it likely would.
He didn’t expect that the Cadre would open fire on one of their major warships until it became clear they were in danger of losing it. That meant that even after the attack started, there would be a window where his ships could distract the smaller vessels and give him a chance to capture the larger one.
Based on their track record thus far, Brad was a bit skeptical that they’d succeed in actually capturing one of the Cadre’s larger vessels. The pirates were a bit bloody-minded for that. They’d do whatever they could to destroy their vessels first.
All one had to do to recognize that was look at what they’d done to the tanker to prevent its capture. Lioness or the carrier would be even more protected.
That kind of behavior was worrying. What exactly was so important? This new behavior hinted at something far more sinister going on than he’d originally anticipated. Something he and Falcone needed to get to the bottom of as quickly as possible.
If, of course, the ambush didn’t go completely sour. While the local area of space wasn’t completely empty, they were having to rely on his ships’ stealth capability far more than he preferred. Sitting still in space at a distance usually worked, but not always.
A rap at the hatch of his appropriated office distracted him from his dour thoughts. It was Falcone.
“We just got a tight-beam com from Oath of Vengeance. They’re here.”
“What kind of information could they give us on the Cadre ships?” he asked as he stood.
“Not much. Passive scanners are crap at this range, and they all seem to be using heat-dampening stealth. It looks like three ships, but there could be a fourth one. Your tactical officer wasn’t willing to commit. He did say that one of them looked pretty big during his initial calculations.”
So, not a transfer from this tanker to another one. He’d worried about the Cadre being that paranoid.
They stepped out into the corridor and headed for the bridge, such as it was. He’d brought Mike Randall over to get the damaged consoles back online, and the troopers had cleaned up the blood spilled in the takeover.
He didn’t expect to see anything directly through the tanker’s scanners. They were pathetic. The incoming vessels would be on top of them before he’d see them on passive scanners.
Aurora Farkus, Oath’s backup pilot, glanced up from her console as Brad and Falcone walked into the bridge. “Still nothing on passive scanners, sir. Not only are they coming in under stealth, they’re using the asteroid to block visual of their approach. It looks as if they’re sending a scout to check us out, based on the information Konrad sent me.”
Brad took his seat and brought up the feed coming from Oath of Vengeance. It was just as sketchy as one might imagine.
If forced to make a wager, he’d bet one of the escorts was a destroyer and the other a corvette. The shadow that might be a third one behind the large ship could be either. He should probably bet on it being real and being a second destroyer, just to be safe.
He opened a channel to Saburo. “Rise and shine. Our guests have arrived.”
“Copy that. We’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
“No rush. It’ll take at least double that for their scout to get decent images of us,” Brad said. “Then we have to actually link up with them before we board. I figure at least an hour.”
“That’s fine, but I don’t want my people feeling like they can amble along to the fight. Trust me, hurry up and wait isn’t just a motto. It’s a way of life.”
Brad laughed as he killed the line and settled in to observe the approaching ship. Odds were very good that either this ship or the big one was going to open communications with the tanker before things got rolling. That was where the biggest risk was going to come in.
While he’d been talking, Falcone had settled in at the remaining conso
le. She’d been working on splicing together audio of the captain they’d recovered from the backup disks so that it seemed as if he was saying different things. She’d coordinated with Brenda Andre over Fleet protocol during refueling operations. That gave her a potential set of responses that made sense.
The only problem was going to be dealing with the visual aspect. They didn’t have any recordings of the communication between the tanker and any of the vessels it refueled. Even if they had, they wouldn’t have risked using them. Minute changes in hairstyle or clothing or even the people on the bridge of the tanker would have quickly given them away.
Since that wasn’t going to work, they were going to bluff their way through with a com failure. If the other team didn’t buy what they were selling, this could get ugly fast.
The tanker’s passive scanners finally picked up the scout as it was coming around the asteroid to get a good look at them. The vessel broke out of stealth and went to active scanners, bathing the tanker in signal.
It must’ve been relatively satisfied with what it saw, because the scans dialed back their intensity and the ship settled into an overwatch position. As Brad had suspected, it was a light corvette.
“Incoming signal,” Farkus said. “They are requesting visual.”
Brad raised an eyebrow at Falcone. “Are you ready?”
“I sure as Everlit hope so,” the Agent said. “Here goes our canned response.”
The response she’d put together had the captain explaining that they’d had an equipment failure with the camera on the bridge. It was a straightforward as they could make it. The only question was if the other ship would accept the answer and be lulled by hearing a familiar voice.
After a few seconds, Falcone sagged a little bit. “They acknowledged the failure and said to get busy getting it fixed. They didn’t sound suspicious.”
Score one for the good guys. Now they just had to hope that their ruse held long enough for the tanker to begin fueling operations.
The situation became more defined over the next half hour. Two other vessels, in addition to the corvette, were running escort duty for the larger ship. They were still on the other side of the asteroid, so the tanker couldn’t get a direct view.
With the Cadre corvette sitting virtually on top of them, it was far too risky to receive any sort of communication from any of the Vikings’ ships. At this point, his people probably knew exactly what was coming to meet the tanker and couldn’t tell him.
Well, he’d find out soon enough.
“I think I’ve pegged one of the escorts,” Falcone said. “I’m not a naval type, but the scanner signature is pretty close to Heart of Vengeance. I’m guessing it’s a heavy corvette. The other one, it’s still a little bit light on the data, but I think it’s bigger.”
Brad nodded and rose to look over her shoulder. “Back before I became a mercenary, I used to have a thing for Fleet ships. I was always studying their stats and information about them. Of course, I was doing the same for merchant ships, so I suppose I was just a space nut.”
The readings on her console did look like a destroyer of some kind and a heavy corvette. If so, the escort forces were almost as powerful as what the Vikings had brought along with them. And the way that the escort vessels were keeping an eye on the general area around the asteroid was far too professional for Brad’s liking.
It was a good thing that his people and he had come up with some options to deal with the escorts. The key, though, was that all of their planning revolved around keeping the enemy unaware that they were in a trap until Brad sprang it. If one of the escorts spotted something anomalous, the game was up.
It took another twenty minutes, but Brad finally got a good look at the ship coming to pick up a load of He-3. It was that damned carrier.
“Well, well, well,” he muttered. “Hello, mister carrier. Isn’t this interesting. And just a little bit more dangerous than I’d hoped.”
Falcone turned in her chair to face him. “How do you mean? We knew they had the ship. Shouldn’t our planning have revolved around meeting it?”
“Oh, we planned for it. I’d just hoped we’d get the cruiser instead. One decapitating blow and we’ve had the Phoenix. Now? We can probably take this ship off the table one way or another.
“That’s going to hurt the Cadre, but they’ve already proven how good they are at recovering from blows like that. The carrier is definitely second place in my mind. Though to be fair, I really want to know where they got it. If we can put a name to it, we’ll roll up some of the people working with them at Fleet.”
“We have a new signal,” Farkus said. “It’s coming from the carrier.”
“Let’s put this one on audio,” Brad said. “I’d certainly like to hear what the enemy commander sounds like.”
“Sidhe, this is Longbow,” a man said in a calm, professional voice. “I understand you’re having com problems. Is that correct?”
Falcone’s fingers danced on her console.
“Yes,” the dead captain said. “We’re working to rectify the problem and I hope to have it operational within the hour.”
“Copy that. Since I can’t visually confirm who I’m talking to, even though I recognize your voice, I’m going to have to ask you to authenticate with the code phrase.”
“Shit,” Falcone said. “I never saw anything about a code phrase in any of the communications that were recorded. What do I say?”
Brad’s mind raced. If they gave the answer wrong, this mission was completely blown and so were they. Not only that, they couldn’t delay answering without raising suspicion.
“Since we don’t know, we might as well try bluffing our way out,” Brad said. “Tell him there isn’t one.”
His gut tightened as her fingers danced across the console. If they got this wrong, the carrier would launch drones long before his ships could intervene.
“What in Everdark are you talking about?” the dead captain asked. “I don’t have one of those.”
The silence dragged on for a few seconds before the man responded. “And you knowing that is just as good as having one, don’t you think? We’ll be in position to take on He-3 in twenty-five minutes. Start fueling operations as soon as we’re ready. I’d rather not wait out here any longer than I need to. Longbow out.”
Brad let out the breath he’d been holding. “I think we just got all the good luck we can count on for this mission. Based on the enemy locations, which of our ships is in the best position for us to signal?”
“Bound by Law,” Farkus said. “They won’t be able to respond, but they should be able to signal the other ships.”
“Give them our new schedule. Once we start the fueling operations, Saburo will lead the troopers over. Call it fifteen minutes after we start. We’ll be right behind him.
“I want Law to open fire on the destroyer so that the first shots impact fifty minutes from right now. With any luck, the destroyer won’t see what’s coming and it will die fast. That’ll leave our two destroyers and two corvettes to stack up against the two Cadre corvettes.”
Falcone stood. “What about the carrier? We can’t count it out until we disable it. If we can disable it.”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re going to be involved in this fight,” Brad said. “But their main armament is drones. If we can disable the ship quickly enough, we’ll take them off the board.”
“I thought you said we couldn’t count on any more good luck going forward.”
He allowed himself a small smile. “There’s good luck and then there’s things you just simply have to get done. Trust my people. We’ll get this done.”
Brave words. Now they just had to make the magic happen.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Over the next twenty-five minutes, the carrier grew large in their passive sensors. Much larger than ships in space normally appeared.
When hostile vessels exchanged torpedoes and mass-driver slugs, the ranges were measured in the tens of thousands of k
ilometers. Now, with the massive vessel virtually on top of the tanker, the distance was less than two hundred meters.
At that laughably short distance, a torpedo would barely have enough speed to penetrate the tanker’s hull. Mass-driver rounds, on the other hand, would blow huge gaping holes all the way through the tanker. Which was the primary reason Brad was taking every single person on the initial attack.
Falcone had given him a little bit more information on the class of ship he was looking at while they were waiting. The Spearthrower-class drone carrier was one of the heavier units in use by Fleet. It only had four torpedo launchers and twenty eight-barrel fifteen-millimeter gatlings as its onboard armament, but those weren’t the primary firepower ships like that carried into battle.
The thirty Javelin interceptor drones inside its hull each hosted a four-barrel fifteen-millimeter gatling and a single torpedo. Individually, they weren’t all that powerful. In a swarm, they could wreck even big ships in seconds.
The drones were remotely controlled by “pilots” on the carrier. Six people controlled five drones each. Those people and their controls were the weak point that Brad intended to exploit during the attack.
The feel for the ships that Falcone had gotten was by necessity incomplete. Fleet wasn’t sharing any information that they didn’t have to. Certainly not deck plans.
Records from the last time the Vikings had engaged this ship gave them a good idea of how the engineering and launch facilities were laid out, in a big-picture kind of way. That in turn pointed to several areas of the ship that would be protected enough to shield both the bridge and the control facilities.
Frankly, Brad wouldn’t be surprised if the two were combined. It made a kind of sense for the ship’s commander or any admiral on board to have direct access to the pilots during battle.
Based on the information Falcone had received, they believed Fleet had only eight of these carriers. It would still be a while before Falcone’s contacts managed to verify which one was out of contact, but they’d have more data to trace this ship soon.
